Whilst attending a workshop this week I was directed toward the lecturer Dr Ruth Falconer, for her research into simulations especially GPU based simulations. I arranged an appointment to speak with her about using SpatialOS as a simulation platform with the hope that she would be able to give me some good directions to look in to further focus my title.

I was very fortunate to have a meeting with both Ruth and James, due to coincidental timetable availability, and was able to get a good understanding of their upcoming simulation research and how my undergraduate dissertation could assist – perhaps by conducting some preliminary research. It goes without saying that my project would not be setting up a vast biological simulation in the way that this research project hopes to do – as that would be extremely far outside the scope of a single undergrad in 6 months. However, it was suggested to me that I could perform some performance analysis to help direct the doctoral research.

I left the meeting armed with a collection of leads, mostly focused around reading about the existing FLAME GPU framework for agent based modelling, as well as looking at traditional performance analysis techniques. I was also told that some major considerations for performance issues could be:

• Latency and how far out of step the simulation can get and recover from.
• The difference between 2D and 3D biological simulations.
• The performance advantages of using cloud based systems over GPU systems.